Buy functional mushrooms online. Reishi, chaga, and cordyceps — fruiting-body extracts and powders.

about functional mushrooms

What are functional mushrooms?

"Functional mushroom" is the umbrella term for the culinary and traditional mushrooms people cook with, brew as tea, or take as a powder, as distinct from the button and portobello mushrooms of the produce aisle. They have long culinary and folk histories across East Asia, Siberia, and Northern Europe. We carry a small, carefully sourced range: chaga, reishi, and cordyceps. We describe what each mushroom is, what species it belongs to, and where it grows, and we make no health or therapeutic claims about any of them.

We keep the range deliberately narrow. Rather than list a dozen species we can't vouch for, we stock the few we can source cleanly and identify with confidence, then say plainly what they are. Mushroom labeling in this market is famously loose: species get swapped, mycelium gets sold as fruiting body, and country-of-origin claims often can't be checked. A short, honest shelf beats a long, vague one. If you are comparing functional mushrooms across vendors, the questions worth asking are simple ones: which species is it exactly, is it fruiting body or grain-grown mycelium, and has anyone tested it for the heavy metals mushrooms pull out of their substrate.

Powder, extract, and tincture

Functional mushrooms come in a few formats and the difference is mostly about processing. A powder is the dried mushroom milled fine, the whole material with nothing removed. An extract concentrates the mushroom by pulling its compounds into a solvent and then reducing it, so a smaller amount carries more of the source material. A tincture is simply a liquid extract kept in an alcohol base and sold in a dropper bottle.

You'll often see "dual extraction" on mushroom labels. It refers to a two-step process: a hot-water extraction (which pulls water-soluble compounds) followed by an alcohol extraction (which pulls the ones water leaves behind), then the two are combined. It is a description of how the extract was made, not a health claim. Our reishi tincture is an alcohol-based liquid extract of reishi in exactly this vein.

How to choose by species

Choosing comes down to which mushroom you're after and what form suits you. Here is what we stock:

• Chaga (Inonotus obliquus), the dense, charcoal-like conk that grows on birch trees across Siberia, Canada, and Northern Europe. We supply it as dried chunks, best simmered into a tea.
• Reishi (Ganoderma lingzhi), the hard, woody, glossy red-brown mushroom known as lingzhi in China. Because the fruiting body is woody rather than tender, we carry it as dried slices and as the reishi tincture.
• Cordyceps (Cordyceps militaris), the bright-orange cultivated species, ground into a fine powder. Ours is grown on a cultivated substrate, which makes it a sustainable, vegan-friendly source.

Mushrooms bioaccumulate metals from whatever substrate they grow on, so we screen our stock for lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury and verify species before listing. Our products are made from fruiting-body material, the actual mushroom, rather than grain-grown mycelium.